Today I am very excited because two of my pieces will be exhibited at the 2nd annual Ras al Khaimah Fine Art Festival!

The Festival is part of the Al Qasimi Foundation’s efforts to make tangible contributions to the cultural development of both Ras Al Khaimah and the UAE, and this year it features over forty artists across film, photography and fine art. It also will showcase work by some of the students at RAK Academy, where I teach art.

The premiere of the exhibition will be a black tie event at the very posh Banyan Tree Al Wadi hotel, which I’m super-excited for, and the festival itself runs for four days. A little bird has said to me that there will be cocktails and caviar, and the thought of Simon in a tuxedo is very nice too!

It was a busy weekend and, frankly, I wasn’t sure if I was going to manage to finish my two pieces mentioned in my last post, as I was feeling under the weather. Fortunately my lovely Simon, bless him, has been nursing me to good effect and I managed to complete one of them.

My friend Daria has had her birthday recently and she ‘subtly’ suggested that her living room wall is a bit empty and in need of something new. Well, I did not fancy finding myself on the bad side of Daria (which would probably include sudden appearance of more than quirky pictures on my Facebook page or encyclopaedia send in parts via messages as I can recall) so I got to work on her portrait. It’s A3 size, watercolour and pen on paper and I really hope that Daria likes it.

I made this self portrait a recently and get around taking a pic of it to post on the blog. Its 50X40 cm, ink and pencil. I really like inks, the way you can build layers with them. Combination of black, brown and gold looks fine too.

Through it’s not the most ‘happy chappy’ image image on the world it made me feel good after finishing.